Harlem troop bring film to stage for spring musical

Harlem High School’s annual spring musical kicked off Thursday, with a series of performances through next weekend.

This year, the Harlem High School Theater is bringing The Wedding Singer to life

Dylan Bollinger, the director of the Harlem High School theater program, said the play is loosely based on the 1998 film starring Adam Sandler and centered around Robbie Hart after he is left at the alter and begins to pick up the pieces.

“The plot lines are very, very similar, there are some character differences in the story and some characters are changed but the story line is generally the same. It’s a love story about a wedding singer who gets left at the alter and then has to find his way back to himself, and through that he meets his future wife Julia, and it’s about them falling in love and deciding that they’re supposed to be together,” Bollinger said.

Like the film, Bollinger said, the show is rated PG-13 for suggestive situations appealing to teenagers and above due to the ’80s theme, musical score, comical situations and the love story that surfaces during the show.

The cast includes several students, Dylan Boyd, Sydney Hillman, David Story and Ben Evans, who Bollinger said most recently won championships at the Region 3AA Literary meet in musical and dramatic events.

“The cast is a dedicated group of seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen, eighth grade, seventh grade, all students from the middle school and the high school, and they’ve had to endure a shortened rehearsal time because of the snow storm and then the ice storm,” Bollinger said

Bollinger said the play has been entered in the Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards, aka The Shuler Hensley Awards.

Key characters Elizabeth Drake and Ben Evans will represent Harlem High School and Columbia County in the Shuler Student Ensemble, and it will be an opportunity for them to perform on the same stage as Tony Award-winning actor Shuler Hensley.

Harlem was the first school in the area last year to participate in the awards and was one out of five schools to participate outside the metro Atlanta area.

“We are excited,” Bollinger said. “We want everybody to come out if you come to the show early we’re going to treat you to some great music that if you were from the eighties you probably went to weddings and heard these songs.”